Chasing Lincoln’s Killer: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 begins on Good Friday morning, April 14, 1865. Booth awoke and assumed the day would be another in a series of days that each seemed worse than the last. On April 9th, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered. On the 11th, Lincoln had called for blacks to be given the right to vote, and on the 13th the city had celebrated with its grand illumination.

Booth came from a theatrical family, and had a bright and profitable future as a handsome actor with fans all over the country, in both the North and South. Although he was vain and cared about his reputation, he was willing to sacrifice his life for the lost cause of the South.

On April 14, after eating breakfast at the National Hotel where he was staying, Booth went to Ford’s Theatre to collect his mail. He found a letter waiting for him and heard the news that had come from the president’s messenger earlier that morning: Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd would be attending the evening performance at the theater that night, in less than eight hours, with General Ulysses S. Grant in tow. The theater’s owners were going to prepare a special, expanded presidential box.

Booth knew everything about the layout of Ford’s Theatre and how Lincoln would move through it that night. He also knew all the different ways of accessing the president’s box, which hung directly above the stage. And although Booth had never played a role in the play Our American Cousin, which Lincoln would watch that evening, he knew everything about the play’s timing and action. It was the perfect situation: instead of having to hunt the president down, Lincoln would fall into his lap. Booth had eight hours to prepare, which he thought was probably just enough time to get ready.

On the same day, Abraham Lincoln ate breakfast with his family and discussed the details of the surrender at Appomattox with his eldest son Robert, who was home from the war and had been present at the historic moment. Later, Lincoln conducted a meeting with his cabinet, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Welles wrote in his diary that Lincoln had dreamt that he was on the water in an indescribable vessel, speeding towards a shore. Lincoln took his dreams seriously; the dream about the vessel recurred to him before each important battle of the war. After a dream about his son, he had sent a telegram to Mary Todd telling her to take away Tad’s pistol. Lincoln spent the rest of the day in a routine way, taking meetings, reading mail, going through paperwork. He wanted to finish his government business by 3:00 PM, when he planned to speak to his wife about something.

At the Ford Theater, preparations were underway. A notice was published in the newspaper announcing that Grant and Lincoln would attend the play that night, and the theater borrowed flags to decorate the president’s box from the nearby treasury department. Booth saw one of the theater’s owners returning with the flags, confirming to him that the president was coming to Ford’s. Meanwhile, a young army surgeon named Dr. Charles A. Leale decided to attend the performance, eager to catch a glimpse of the hero Grant.

Booth went to the Kirkwood House, the hotel where the new Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying, and left a letter with the desk clerk to be given to Johnson. The message read, “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.” He then went to the boarding house owned by Mary Surratt, the mother of Booth’s friend John Harrison Surratt, where he gave Mary a package to bring to her other inn, located south of Washington in Surrattsville, Maryland. Booth also asked Mary to tell the tavern keeper John Lloyd to prepare the guns, ammunition and other supplies he and her son had hidden there, because he would come to pick these things up in Maryland that evening. Accompanied by one of her boarders, Lewis Weichmann, Mary soon left for Surrattsville.

Booth made his final preparations. He selected a Deringer pistol that could be easily concealed as his weapon. The pistol only fired a single shot, but it was a large, solid ball weighing almost a full ounce, that was deadly if it hit its target. Reloading was time consuming, and Booth knew that he would not have that time to spare. There was a risk that the pistol would misfire. Swanson speculates that perhaps this risk added to the thrill Booth wanted to take in his adventurous act. Perhaps he thought it more heroic or honorable to kill with a single shot. Or perhaps he simply thought the gun was better looking and more stylish than a big six-shooter. As his backup weapon, Booth brought an elegant-looking bowie knife. He took few other supplies: some money, a compass in a velvet case, and pictures of five of his girlfriends.

In Surrattsville, Mary Surratt told the tavern keeper, John Lloyd, to expect callers that evening who would come for the hidden shooting irons, or fire arms. Lloyd took the shooting irons from their hiding spot between the walls and put them, with the binoculars he had found in the package, in his bedroom.

Back in Washington, Booth gathered the conspirators he had recruited to strike against the president. The year before, these men had failed in a harebrained plan to kidnap Lincoln. There had been a number of threats to Lincoln’s life over the course of his presidency—he received death threats and jars of poisoned fruit from angry people who supported the South. On the way to his first inauguration in 1861, Lincoln had travelled in disguise through the city of Baltimore, where rebels were planning to assassinate him. But although many such plots on the president’s life circulated throughout the war, none of them resulted in serious action.

Booth himself had organized a plan to kidnap Lincoln in late 1864. He paid for things for his coconspirators and allowed them to enjoy the perks of his fame, hoping to guarantee their loyalty to his plan. But on March 17, 1865, the night when the conspirators planned to ambush Lincoln’s carriage, Lincoln did not appear as planned. In fact, he was giving a speech in the National, the very hotel where Booth stayed when in Washington. After that, events moved quickly, as Richmond fell and General Lee surrendered. Yet presidential security was so weak that all Booth would have had to do, if he was determined to give his life to kill the president, was go to the Executive Mansion, request a meeting with Lincoln, and shoot him.

Now, on April 14, 1865, Booth called on George Atzerodt and Lewis Powell to help him murder Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. David Herold would accompany Lewis Powell to Seward’s home, where the Secretary was lying in bed recovering from a serious carriage crash. Atzerodt tried to refuse his assignment to murder Johnson, but Booth threatened to turn him in to the authorities if he refused. What none of Booth’s co-conspirators knew was that Booth had given a friend a letter to be sent to a newspaper the following day. In this letter, he justified the assassinations and incriminated his co-conspirators, by signing their names to the letter as well.

Earlier that afternoon, Lincoln had gone on a carriage ride alone with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. She had been devastated by the 1862 death of their eleven-year-old son Willie. Now, Lincoln was relieved by the coming end of the war, and told Mary that they must both turn a corner and put the distressing years of the war behind them. Perhaps they could visit the Pacific Ocean or return to Chicago.

This carriage ride had forced other important business to be delayed, and the Lincolns were late arriving at the theater. General Ulysses Grant and his wife had not accepted the Lincolns’ invitation to the theater, so Lincoln and Mary Todd brought their friends Major Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris. When the presidential party arrived, the action on stage stopped, and the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief,” the traditional music for a presidential entrance. The audience rose and cheered for the president who had brought down slavery and saved the country from breaking in two.